Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday November 10, 2010 @01:23PM
from the serious-gold-farmers dept.

Orome1 writes "When it comes to dangerous Web threats, the only constant is change and gone are the days of predictable attack vectors. Instead, modern blended threats such as Aurora, Stuxnet, and Zeus infiltrate organizations through a variety of coordinated tactics, usually a combination of two or more. Phishing, compromised websites, and social networking are carefully coordinated to steal confidential data, because in the world of cybercrime, content equals cash. And, as a new Websense report illustrates, the latest tactics have now moved to a political and nationalistic stage. Cybercriminals and their blended attacks are having a field day taking advantage of security gaps left open by legacy technologies like firewalls, anti-virus, and simple URL blockers."

Maybe its time to work on better out of band authentication and confirmation devices.

Take the IBM ZTIC that plugs into a USB port, and communicates encrypted from the device itself to the bank, just using the computer as a passthrough. This is what needs to be worked on, and maybe banks should start handing these out to customers. This way, even if an end user's computer is infected, their bank account couldn't be logged into without the device, and even if someone was to gain access upon logging on, all bank transfers would have to be confirmed on the ZTIC, so a quick transfer of funds would be caught and denied.

Applying this to MMOs, maybe the ZTIC device to confirm character transfers or deletion, as well as be needed to confirm logging on.

The advantage of using the ZTIC device over a cellphone for this is that the ZTIC device is simple -- it isn't a full fledged computer like a cell phone, and only does one task. Of course, exploits might be found, but the attack surface for this device is a lot smaller than a general purpose machine.

Nations are an emergent phenomena. It all starts with small tribes of people that are small enough that the leaders know everybody, and then grows as the technology and institutions grow to be able to keep more people under its umbrella. Once the group of nations grow large enough, they then have the choice of either attempting to dominate one another until no others remain or cooperating. The eventual result of either of these paths would probably be one singular world government, assuming that either ultimate victory or complete peaceful cooperation are even possible. If they're not, then we're all just wasting a hell of a lot of time trying.

But really, in answer to your question: You have to start with Nations, and long before they become obsolete they become an entrenched middle-man. Doing away with them is a lot like trying to eliminate any middle-man who wants to keep their job.